09/17/2023 What I Read Last Week
Digital Infrastructure news: Google, Vantage, Enfabrica, lightwave fabrics, Quantum
Weekly Edition of curated news about Digital Infrastructure
[Link] Google applies to develop Kansas City data center. Google has submitted two planning applications to develop its plot in Northland at Hunt Midwest Business Center in Kansas City.
[Link] AustralianSuper Backs Vantage Data Centers with €1.5 Billion Investment and Joins DigitalBridge $DBRG as Key Shareholder. Australian pension fund AustralianSuper announced that it is investing €1.5 billion (~$1.8B) to acquire a significant minority stake. Later in the week Vantage announced the continued deployment of hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO), a renewable fuel to replace conventional diesel fuel in generators. The company will roll out HVO in several of its largest markets in North America and EMEA.
[Link] Enfabrica Raises $125 Million Series B to Fuel Ramp of AI Infrastructure Networking Chips. Closing on an oversubscribed $125 million Series B financing round, the startup says it will use the money to advance its Accelerated Compute Fabric Switch (ACF-S) devices and solutions, which complement GPUs, CPUs and accelerators to solve critical networking, I/O and memory scaling problems in data center AI and high-performance computing clusters.
[Link] Lightwave Fabrics: At-Scale Optical Circuit Switching for Datacenter and Machine Learning Systems. I think I understand what is being presented here, but don’t want to mess it up, so here is the AI-generated summary: The article describes the development of lightwave fabrics for datacenter networking and machine learning applications. The fabrics use optical circuit switches and optical transceivers to enable high-bandwidth bidirectional traffic on a single strand of optical fiber. The fabrics have provided substantial benefits for long-lived traffic patterns in datacenter networks and predictable traffic patterns in tightly-coupled machine learning clusters. The authors report results for a large-scale ML superpod with 4096 tensor processing unit (TPU) V4 chips that has more than one ExaFLOP of computing power.
[Link] Researchers Unlock Chip-Based Thermionic Cooling for Quantum Computers, More. Tom’s Hardware reports on a research team from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland that designed a vacuum-tube-like device that allows for cooling to happen in a purely electronic way - a possible road toward slashing cooling costs for dilution-refrigerated quantum computers by a factor of ten.
I watched some incredible videos last week:
Bill Gurley presents 2,851 miles. Amazing talk from the All-in Summit last week.
Crypto Banter - Token2049 conference. Epic roundup of everything taking place at the crypto conference in Singapore last week.
BrainChip CEO Sean Hehir Sums Up Their Value Proposition for Oppenheimer Investors.
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JohnRath.eth